1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer networks. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for facilitating distributed delivery of content across a computer network.
2. Related Art
The explosion of broadband communications has helped the Internet become a viable distribution mechanism for multimedia and high quality video. Prior to broadband, conventional modems were much to slow for the large file sizes that video demands. Now that more and more people have broadband connections and are requesting ever larger items of content, bandwidth and server utilization is quickly becoming a bottleneck on the distribution end. In some cases, extraordinary events have brought online news sites to a virtual standstill as people flocked to them to see video of the events.
Some companies have tried to solve this problem by creating server farms and clusters. These have been effective in handling routine peaks in demand and creating a level of fault-tolerance, but overall, they have been ineffective in handling demand resulting from an extraordinary event.
Another issue with increased bandwidth is the cost of the increased bandwidth to service providers. The Internet is made up of numerous smaller networks that have peering arrangements between them. Service providers typically have to pay more for information that is passed outside of their network. Likewise, companies typically have to pay more as the level of information they request increases.
Attempts have been made to alleviate these problems by creating peer-to-peer distributed content delivery networks. In these networks, peers that have previously downloaded content become potential servers for the content for other peers that subsequently request the content. While these content delivery networks have succeeded at moving traffic away from the server farms where the information was originally published, they have created new problems.
One of the biggest problems in classic peer-to-peer networks is performance. Quite often, a peer that a client is routed to for downloading content has limited bandwidth and is topologically distant on the network. In this case, download times at the client end can actually increase, and bandwidth cost can increase as well because the traffic has to travel across more networks.
Another major problem with distributed content delivery networks is the increased local traffic resulting from local searches for content. More clients on the network result in more local searches. As these distributed networks grow, they actually degrade or split into smaller subsets of the entire network.
What is needed is a method and apparatus for facilitating the distributed delivery of content across a network without the problems associated with existing distributed content delivery networks.